Suggestion about spam

Give the option to 'flag' at the top, rather then having to scroll down.............

I think this was not done just because of potential abuse concerns. I was flagged once for telling an OP that his post was offensive, lol.

Everyone has their own opinion. I would like to make it a little harder for them to get on the forum. Enough said.

I think it is working pretty well at this point in time.
 
I can only imagine the crap that gets sent to people that are dumb enough to actually contact that idiot that is posting all of those stupid messages.  I'd feel sorry for them, except that it is because enough people fall for those scams to keep them coming, so it is their fault we have to go through this nonsense.
 
Bob Bone
 

Including two just now!

Could someone pop to the Sonar Le forum to finish off a load, please?

There have historically been squabbles between forum members, and it would be too easy to cause someone to get banned, out of just being mean-spirited.
 
There is one knucklehead love-guru-voodoo-child that is the chief poster these days of spam, and since forum members have become aware of the 3-flag-spam-be-gone approach, even that idiot gets his posts and accounts removed pretty quickly.
 
And, by the way, I noticed the other day that I do not have to scroll down much at all to see the Flag as Spam button, so I think even that works OK.
 
Bob Bone
 

paulo

Ryan Munnis [Cakewalk]
One spam flag is too little in my opinion. Someone could theoretically go around flagging people's posts and then everyone's temporarily auto-banned until an admin catches wind of it. That's a big inconvenience for everyone. It's not uncommon for a few people to have to flag something for it to go away. I actually was concerned that three flags might be too little but it seems like it's been working pretty well so far.
 

I hear what you are saying, but if anyone really wanted to do that they could just set up 3 accounts and do it anyway - we all know that there are people on here with more than one "identity", so it's clearly possible. If abuse of the system resulted in a permanent ban they could only do it once before they effectively banned themselves - I can't see that any worthwhile, regular member would want to do that.

True, but it's a lot more work and once we banned their IP they'd have to jump through many more hoops to pull it off. I've seen a lot of non-spam posts marked as spam (at least with one flag) for whatever disagreement or differing opinion people seem to be having. I think it's in everyone's better interest to not make it so easy for people to ban each other, even if it's only a temp ban. 

The best solution I've seen on a lot of forums is you cannot even post a question, start a new thread, until you reach a certain post count. Just like here you cannot post links or pictures until somewhere around 30 posts. 
The other good thing about this is it would make newbies read the forum first before asking the same old questions or digging up threads from 4 years ago on Google. 
Steinburg won't let you post at all until your register your software on some of their forums. 
I bet the number of members with a post counts under 6 is more than half the user base. 

That is the downside for sure. Steinburgs system of only letting newbies post in certain sub forums might be better. Here you could use the Starting out forum. If it gets spammed it would not be a big deal. I guess it depends on the forum software which might not be that sophisticated. 
 
Another deterrent I've seen used, is you have to fill in a lot more personal data and answer a Sonar question first. Signing up here is just way to easy IMHO.  

I think things are pretty good here, seems to be working for me. Spammers are always a pain, but the 3 flags things seems to work. I flagged a handful of posts as soon as I saw them about 8 hours ago, some of my flags were the third flagger and this site is quiet around then, but there was enough prepared to deal with the spammer.
 
I have nearly 20,000 posts on a non-music site by Hearst Corp. (magazine company) and they overhauled their site for the worse. They had a big user base, lots of established user supporting and encouraging new users that would evolve into knowledgeable and giving members themselves. Then they re-vamped, removed a user-moderator, the spam went nuts, but they had traffic and it was financed through advertisements. They killed that site.
 
I'm on a football (soccer) form, with 2 tiers. The lower tiers can be interesting, but often crumbles into petiness, fuelled by trolls. So you don't bother reading to much, just read the interesting and more respectful top tier. Then you have something valuable to give, and you realise you can't, you're a forum spectator.
 
I posted on Celemony's forum and PBend data on midi exports, and was faced with a notification that my thread had to be Mod approved. My reaction was 'FFS really', not a shouting angry 'FFS really', but one of deflation having gone through all the sign up rigmarole, to a from emails. Imagine that as a new user with a genuine issue that require more than noobie experience to resolve. Imagine you had spent ages researching before you reached for forum support. You may have even been reading the forum for ages, just never needed to ask anything. This stuffs important to us, we don't need things being more difficult. when things are being difficult enough.
 
I like this set up, I'm happy to flag, and others are, because forums belong to the users, if they don't, they set up their own ons that do. No site is perfect, but this seems pretty damn good. And we don't have to [URL] code to get blummin' hot links to work, just past them in. [IMG] is nice too

@Ryan How about IIS URL rewriter?